Are you frustrated trying to get visitors to register for a free trial of your SaaS? Feeling like the only way to do it is to throw even more “Start Your Free Trial!” buttons all over your site, even though you know they’re not producing results? There is a better way! In this case study, we’ll discover how Bulkly used OptinMonster to increase free trial signups by 134%.

Meet Bulkly

Bulkly is a social media tool for Buffer. It recycles your social media updates and automatically sends them to your Buffer account.

Chris Makara from Bulkly talked with us about how they’re using OptinMonster to grow their email list and increase sales.

How Bulkly Uses OptinMonster

Chris says he initially only focused on using OptinMonster to grow his email list from blog posts.

I’ve created a ton of content around automating different things on social media. For example, I have a blog post that talks about how to build your own Pinterest bot for free. It covers how to follow and unfollow users automatically. I used MonsterLinks and inline forms for those pages.

A MonsterLink is a link, image or button on your site that, when clicked, triggers an OptinMonster campaign. Here is an example from the post mentioned above:

This campaign converts 52.81% of visitors who click the link within the article.

MonsterLinks rely on the reader to initiate the action of subscribing. When the reader initiates, they are more likely to follow through with subscribing.

After seeing how well the Pinterest scripts were working on the blog article, Chris decided to try other types of content upgrades and campaigns.

Using a fullscreen welcome mat, he offered visitors a 6-part email course on creating evergreen social media content. Using OptinMonster’s powerful Display Rules, Chris set the campaign to appear on the majority of pages on his site after 7 seconds while excluding high converting pages like pricing, features, and the homepage.

This campaign converts 4.76% of abandoning visitors.

This fullscreen campaign is an important piece of Bulkly’s sales funnel because the email course directly aligns with Bulkly’s ideal customer: people who want to share evergreen social media content.

Because of the alignment, many users who access this course end up starting a free trial of Bulkly.

Chris continued,

With Bulkly, I needed to go beyond just getting subscribers through content upgrades like the course or Pinterest scripts. I needed to generate actual customers, users of the software itself.

Previously, Chris relied only on calls-to-action scattered throughout the site to encourage visitors to register for a free trial.

As a result, free trial registrations were few.

Chris decided to experiment with a more aggressive call-to-action that would actually start readers on the journey of using Bulkly.

He implemented a fullscreen welcome that shows only for visitors about to leave the site using our exit-intent technology. Exit-intent campaigns display only when the visitor’s mouse motions towards the browser bar, an indication they’re about to leave the site. The campaign shows everywhere except the blog, on important pages like the homepage, pricing, features, etc.

The call-to-action is to try Bulkly for free for 7 days by importing their past 100 social media updates from Buffer.

Chris said,

The thought is that if I can get the user interested in importing their previous social media updates, I’ll be able to show them how easy it is to use the platform to recycle status updates they have already created during their 7 day free trial.

It’s currently converting 4.47% of visitors into a free trial.

He continued,

For me, the biggest improvement I’ve experienced using OptinMonster is being able to generate more free trial users through the different approaches instead of relying on users to find a call-to-action themselves. Since I put an emphasis on aligning specific campaigns with the interests of my ideal customer, it has significantly improved free trial sign ups.

Bulkly is up 134% YTD in free trials compared to the same time last year, with five months still left in the year.

Summary

Visitors to your site may not be ready to purchase on their first visit. Use OptinMonster to educate prospects with content upgrades, and then make a call-to-action they won’t forget using our attention-grabbing full-screen campaigns.

OptinMonster is the best tool that I use to increase leads in a variety of ways. I have seen a 52.94% conversion rate in one of my campaigns and 4.36% of visitors who see our exit-intent campaign convert to free trials. I use OptinMonster on multiple sites and see the same type of results time and time again.Chris Makara, Owner, Bulk.ly